Who is Bob Dylan in 2020? His new album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, finds him contemplating the tremendous weight of legacy and history and how to make sense of it all. Dylan tackles these questions by immersing himself in that history, becoming both subject and historian, both object of cultural critique and the critic.

We can’t just count on changing people’s minds without simultaneously transforming our collective political-economic structures. The causal arrow of social change doesn’t just go from changed social beliefs to changed power relations. It also goes from changed power relations to changed beliefs.

The enormous and violent efforts by the United States and the Lima Group to secure regime change in Venezuela raises a question: Is this the policy Canadians want our government to pursue? Iran and Venezuela have shown courage in challenging US hegemony against all the odds. Where is Canada’s courage?

On May 25, George Floyd, a black resident of Minneapolis, died after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground by the knee of police officer Derek Chauvin. Some of Floyd’s last words were “I can’t breathe.” This event marked yet another appalling viral bystander recording of an unarmed black man’s needless and unconscionable death. Calls for justice are widespread. Police reform is desperately needed.

Trump is a symptom as well as a cause of the polarisation of the US political system, more divided now than at any time since the Civil War ended in 1865. Yet the decline of the US is much greater than the rise of China, significant though that may be, and it is naive to imagine that Beijing will simply displace Washington at the top table.

The spin is in! The Trump administration’s economic ‘message bearers’, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Kevin Hasset, the president’s senior economic adviser, have launched a coordinated effort to calm the growing public concern that the current economic contraction due to the COVID-19 pandemic may be as bad (or worse) than the Great Depression of the 1930s.

In 2020, Joe Biden finds himself as the pick of the Democratic establishment for the US presidential primaries. Their case for Biden is a “return to normalcy” as the strategy to beat Donald Trump in the general election. In Branko Marcetic’s Yesterday’s Man, however, there is a strong case to be made against the 77-year-old’s presidential candidacy by looking into Biden’s legislative record.

A group of economists and policy experts on Wednesday called on President Donald Trump to immediately lift the United States’ crippling sanctions against Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and other countries, warning that the economic warfare—in addition to being cruel in itself—is “feeding the coronavirus epidemic” by hampering nations’ capacity to respond.

Across fifty states, Americans are collectively bracing for the incoming COVID-19 pandemic to hit. The crippling shortages, inability to move and the likely overwhelming of medical services will give Americans a taste of what it is like to live under sanctions that it imposes on a number of countries worldwide

Bernie Sanders has always made elite political journalists uncomfortable, on a deeply personal level. When Sanders rails against the corporate-friendly status quo, it rubs them the wrong way. Accepting the status quo as fundamentally reasonable is a prerequisite for succeeding in modern mainstream political journalism. Anything else makes you an “activist”.